To take advantage of opportunities/solve problems, the need for a greater than local/cross-boundary approach can be seen. Regional cooperation is the nominal tool, yet the goal is to be greater; have greater capacity, resources, market,…. Greater is regional; working across boundaries achieves it. Cooperation is possible when people recognize such regional community. This is regional intelligence: Greater Communities solving problems, of which security is foremost; altogether “community motive.”

Denver and Aurora are gearing up for a modern-day border war over the biggest deal to be announced in the region in a decade.

At issue is a planned Aurora hotel and theme park that could get the largest public subsidy the state has ever awarded, and the possible relocation of one of Denver's most beloved institutions — the National Western Stock Show & Rodeo.

It's a tale rife with all the drama of the Wild West, ...

"The challenge with regionalism is you can't create a doughnut. If we keep shipping our tax base and our cultural institutions to cities in the ring around us, there won't be anything left to support Denver itself," ... president of the Lower Downtown Neighborhood Association.

Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown said the development proposal and resulting tension suggest a fracture in the mostly cooperative dealings among economic developers and business advocacy groups.

"It reveals that regionalism and intergovernmental cooperation look great on a bumper sticker or in a speech, but actually we're all territorial animals," he said.

Absent from the debate is Gov. John Hickenlooper, who during his eight years as Denver mayor touted regionalism as critical to the health of the city and surrounding communities. ...

Trash -- perhaps the most regular, most visible chore municipal governments perform -- is something all residents worry about. And it's one of many issues the four East Side suburbs must study before asking voters to consider merging.

The communities' mayors announced Wednesday they are studying a merger in the most significant step toward regionalism Cuyahoga County has ever seen. Now comes the tough stuff: comparing police staffing, mapping fire coverage, negotiating tax rates and compromising on employee benefits.

The suburbs were once part of Orange Township. Now, they share schools and recreation programs. The villages of Moreland Hills, Orange and Woodmere collaborate for dispatch services, and all four communities contract for income tax collection.

But integrating the four into one city of 13,500 residents and 18 square miles? That's a daunting proposition....

The long-term shape of Auckland could be a 100 km-long 'city'. It would retain one clear major centre – a green CBD – but there could be a dozen secondary city centres. They would lie from north to south – like pearls on the chain – along a natural central spine. They would be urban in appearance. They would be separated by the greens of farmland, town belts, and parks, but well connected by private and public transport.

This alternative vision builds on reality: Aucklanders live on an isthmus and that shapes our choices. (Some live on an isthmus within an isthmus). The completion of the western ring motorway and planned investment in the rail – if it happens -- will only reinforce the north-south development of the city, its region, and its hinterland. It is hard to imagine planning policies that could force change on this natural geography without compounding congestion and costs.We can have a future in which settlements of various sizes (towns, villages, ...

... Bencini, who's been a major backer of regionalism, and of the county's participation in the PTCOG, still had a number of questions.
Bencini said publicly in the days before the meeting that he'd heard from some sources there were other duties the county would have to either contract for or hire additional county staff to handle if the county were not a member of PTCOG.

Bencini asked if Guilford County would need to hire any additional staff to take over other duties formally performed by COG.

"We should not have to contract anything else," Fox said.

Commissioner Kay Cashion asked county staff if the county's membership was still a possibility at some point in the future.

"The door is still open," Fox said.

Gibson said he didn't support the motion to contract out the service for $52,000 instead of joining the organization the county had been a member of for 40 years.

"We talk big talk about regionalism and working with other governments in this area," Gibson said.

He said it seemed now like all of that was just lip service, since the county was no longer going to be a member the group."I think that's the wrong thing to do," Gibson said.

Bencini and Gibson couldn't find any support on the board, which voted to pay the COG $52,000 to administer the grants as a service for non-members.

The system is based on a geocode scheme set up for earth that focuses on established political boundaries as a basis for regional grouping of nations, states and localities. It is decimal system based to take advantage of the sort criteria for numbers in computers. It utilized the Sector Group and Region codes of the United Nations and ISO. Geographic information system technology does not solve the problem, but its tools can be used with the geocodes.

The geocode system effectively organizes Wikipedia entries as a library management and the geocodes can be used for data aggregation. This has been developed under a Creative Commons license and would benefit from a global network implementation where local users cooperatively related subnational geographic regions and component political geography.

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Earth ( we know its a spherical whole)

Humanity's Local Planet

Universe Man at the Boundary

Local Planet - Regional Space

Our Local Planet has systems of Political Geographies which combine as Regional/Greater Communities

Universe Man's place on earth is local and regional silmultaneously depending upon the system of regions, sub-regions of the planet as local wholes: continents, nations, states, provinces, districts, counties, shires, municipalities. etc., which have local regions within and between them which are capable of being greater communities at many scales.

Based on my experience as a regional planner and agency director, 1973 -2008, and in recognition of emerging "regional communities," I developed three thoughts about community that relate to the challenge of working across-boundaries as greater or regional communities. The thoughts/theses apply for communities at the scale of bonding or bridging social capital as defined by Robert D. Putnam, which is alternately local or regional. (link below)

As of 2011, considering the global financial crisis brought about by pursuit of the "profit motive," it struck me that this has come to dominate modern life. This is a relatively new invention of civilization and wasn't a concern for most of the time that homo sapiens has been on the planet.

The three thoughts below that had emerged in my experience of working on regional cooperation now represent what I now posit as the "community motive." Concern about "profit" can emerge within an established community over time, but, to my mind the "profit motive" does not exist in the wild.

1) Community precedes cooperation.2) Community is how life solves all problems.3) Security is the primary purpose of community.

These three thoughts, theses if you will, are the basis of the "community motive." Following is some exposition about each one.

As I see it, security has always been the priority for humans since the plains of Africa. That's why communities first seek to establish defensible boundaries. After the basics are in place, security focus shifts to the social and economic. Boundaries work like the membrane in the osmosis experiment most of us have seen in a science class. The membrane is a filter that lets the good things pass through, but keeps unwanted things out. (Osmosis -YouTube - 45 sec.)

The evolved political boundaries of today have consequence. The rules change when you cross them. Though marked on the ground and fortified in some instances, they are conceptual, as pictured above, with Universe Man. The boundary divides the space between local, that within, and regional, everything outside, as labeled in the second panel. The third panel repeats the image within, to show, without graphic elegance, that the land on which Universe Man sits is regional at another scale, as determined by other boundaries, and another area that's local. A territory is both local and regional, depending upon the perspective.

Communities of communities, “regional communities” are greater communities organized to solve a problem, be it managing a watershed, strengthening an economic cluster or ensuring peer competition for school sports. Regional boundaries can be imposed for administrative purposes within states, but for these to be a basis for effective cooperation, a greater community sense is needed for that geography among the people. This is true for multi-state and multi-national regional communities as well. The leaders with such a vision can build a regional community by finding that which is already in place.

This is not to suggest that community is easy to build in order to solve problems. In a crisis, humans of any culture, belief or politics can quickly come together and self-organize to save themselves and others. It was the on-the- ground response to the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated to me the deep responsiveness of human community, as well as the fundamental importance of security. Community is how humans have always survived. This, I think, extends to all life forms.